Federal Policy & Reform

The federal government provides billions of dollars in student aid and tax breaks to the nation’s colleges and universities each year, and it demands remarkably little in return.

The federal government provides billions of dollars in student aid and tax breaks to the nation’s colleges and universities each year, and it demands remarkably little in return.

In large part, that’s because the federal government has relatively few levers with which to hold colleges accountable. Unlike in K-12 education, where federal dollars flow through states to schools, most postsecondary aid goes directly to students, in the form of vouchers (Pell grants), loans, and tax benefits. To withhold money from an institution, the federal government effectively would have to punish its students as well.

The comparatively weak federal accountability levers in higher education are also a testament to the strength of the college lobby, which employed more lobbyists in 2014 than any other industry except electronics manufacturing and pharmaceuticals, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. With colleges in every congressional district, and millions of faculty and staff on voter rolls, college lobbyists have repeatedly beaten back efforts to link federal dollars to student outcomes and college costs.

Federal involvement in higher education goes back to the Morrill Act of 1862, which provided land to states to finance the creation of a system of agricultural colleges, known as “land grant” institutions. The federal role grew in the 1940’s and 1950’s, with passage of the GI Bill — which provided generous tuition benefits to veterans — and the National Defense Education Act, which created the first student-loan program.

But the real watershed was passage of the Higher Education Act, a 1965 law that laid the foundation for the modern student-aid system. The law, which created a system of grants and loans to help students from low-income backgrounds pay for college, firmly established the federal role in ensuring equal access to higher education. In the years since, lawmakers have extended the bill’s benefits to middle- and upper-income students, providing unsubsidized loans and tax benefits to offset rising college costs.

To qualify to award federal financial aid to students, institutions must show that they are financially “responsible” and administratively “capable,” and have been approved by an accreditor and state regulators. Colleges can lose their eligibility if their state or accreditor revokes their approval, or if too many of their students default on their debt, but those conditions rarely happen. For-profit colleges can be kicked out of the programs if too much of their revenue comes from federal aid, but that, too, is uncommon.

Fifty years after the passage of the Higher Education Act, the government awards about $150 billion a year in grants, work-study, and loans to more than 15 million students. Policymakers and the public generally agree that the federal government should continue to make college accessible to all Americans.

Yet as college tuitions have risen, and student debt has skyrocketed, some lawmakers have questioned whether that federal aid may be fueling tuition growth — a theory known as the “Bennett Hypothesis,” which has been widely disputed in research. Others point to rising student loan defaults and lackluster graduation rates and ask why the government isn’t demanding more for the billions that it provides in student aid.

In fact, policymakers have tried to impose cost controls on colleges and condition small amounts of federal aid on student outcomes. But they have faced fierce opposition from colleges, who have branded such efforts “overreach” and accused lawmakers of intruding on academic affairs. In the end, most of the would-be reformers have had to settle for more “transparency” around college costs and student outcomes.

President Obama used both carrots and sticks to pressure colleges to lower their costs and graduate more students. He didn’t always succeed: His plan to reward high-performing colleges with additional Perkins loans went no where, and his controversial college “ratings” plan was reduced to a revamped “College Scorecard.” Still, Obama managed to tie aid to for-profit colleges to their graduates’ debt burdens, and to shine a spotlight on institutions with weak student earnings and low loan repayment rates.

At the same time, Obama sought to make applying for student aid easier and repaying student debt less difficult. He took steps to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, and expanded income-based repayment for student loans. Congress might continue these efforts in the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, which is expected to focus on streamlining and simplifying the student aid and loan repayment systems.

Lawmakers might also look to reform accreditation and increase college accountability, giving institutions more “skin in the game,” i.e., responsibility for their students’ abilities to pay back their student loans.

What the federal role in higher education will look like going forward will depend, in part, on who is elected president next November. On the campaign trail, Democrats are pledging to make college free — or at least debt-free — while Republicans are promising to bring down the cost of college through new technology and alternative credentialing.

If you haven’t yet heard of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the use of race as a factor in college admissions, you may have at least seen the #BeckyWithTheBadGrades buzz on Twitter and wondered what it meant.

Though it is in part a reference to Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” sensation, the hashtag has more to do with higher education than pop culture.

The first total solar eclipse to sweep across the entire continental United States in 38 years will occur on August 21, 2017. Don’t expect reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA) anytime before then.

The HEA expired at the end of 2013 and it’s likely nothing will happen with it in an election year or soon thereafter, agreed a panel of journalists discussing key higher education issues and the 2016 presidential election, at the Education Writers Association National Seminar in Boston in May.

The stereotypes of the financially struggling college students are well-known. They live on ramen, share an apartment or house with several roommates, and work part-time for money to buy beer. They get summer jobs to cover college tuition and expenses. And they come from middle- and upper-class families, so if they do struggle sometimes to pay the bills, that scarcity is hip and cool.

An affordable college education. Politicians and bus stop ads promise it, students and parents dream of it. But can anyone define it?

Authors of one data-rich report tried their best to bring this vague yet crucial concept into focus by answering a simple question: What percent of your income would you need to pay to go to college in each state?

Last month, The Washington Post ran a front-page profile about Edwin Ordoñez: a high school valedictorian who swam across the Rio Grande with his father at age 9. Now he has protection from deportation and is choosing between admissions and scholarship offers from Emory, Williams and Princeton.

The converging trends of falling state investment, rising tuition and stagnant incomes have finally pushed higher education out of the grasp of low- and middle-income Americans, even at community colleges, a new report contends.

The system for funding American flagship public universities is “gradually breaking down,” said Robert J. Birgeneau, a former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-chair of a two-year project to examine the role of public research universities and recommend changes to help them stay competitive.

When Yehimi Cambron crossed the U.S. border from Mexico with her parents, they told her she would not have documented legal status in this country. But as a third-grader, she had no concept of how that would affect her.

It wasn’t until she was 15 and denied a $50 prize in an art competition because she didn’t have a Social Security number that she grasped its meaning.

Do tests or high school grades better determine whether a student is ready for college-level math and reading? For public universities and community colleges, increasingly the answer is both – or no tests at all, reporters learned during a seminar hosted by the Education Writers Association in Los Angeles last month.

Federal higher-education policy is in shambles. The strategy of the past 40 years — to increase student aid, watch tuition rise, and increase student aid again — has reached a breaking point. Federal loans flow freely with few questions asked, giving colleges every incentive to raise tuition and enroll more students, but less reason to worry about whether those students learn anything. Tuition at the average public four-year college has nearly quadrupled since the early 1980s, pushing more students into debt.

Nearly everyone agrees that tuition tax benefits do little to expand college access. But the benefits are popular with the middle class, so policymakers won’t touch them. This brief by the New America Foundation examines who qualifies for the most generous benefit – The American Opportunity Tax Credit — and finds the biggest beneficiaries to be better-off students, and students attending for-profit colleges.

Income-based repayment plans are supposed to make student loan repayment more manageable for low-income borrowers. But critics say the programs offer a windfall to high-income, high-debt professionals, and encourage graduate schools to raise tuition. This paper by the American Enterprise Institute suggests steps to reduce this “moral hazard” and target the programs’ benefits to the neediest students.

Education reformers have long argued that more should be done to hold colleges accountable for the billions they receive in federal student aid. In Tough Love, Ed Trust proposes a system that would cut off aid to institutions with the lowest enrollment of low-income students (which it dubs “engines of inequality) and the worst graduation and loan- repayment rates (“dropout factories” and “diploma mills”).

President Obama’s revamped College Scorecard has been criticized for many things, not least the limitations of the data that underlie it. In this report, the former head of the Education Department’s statistical arm and another researcher find flaws with the Scorecard’s salary data and suggest some steps for fixing its shortcomings.

The College Board’s annual “Trends” reports are the go-to for statistics on student aid and college costs. The latest iteration of “Trends in Student Aid” shows that total student borrowing declined for a fourth straight year in 2014-2015, while grant aid continued to climb. Even so, borrowers continue to struggle with student debt, with nearly one in ten completers (and one in four drop-outs) defaulting within two years of entering repayment.

With the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act looming, stakeholders from all corners are offering lawmakers their wish lists. This white paper, by a broad coalition of stakeholders, calls for linking federal aid to student outcomes and creating a more “flexible” student aid system. It also calls for making college accreditation more transparent and rigorous, and creating “safe spaces for experimentation” with new models of quality assurance.

What new techniques and practices should higher education embrace to ensure that more students graduate? Join the Education Writers Association September 16–17 at Arizona State University to explore cutting-edge innovations that aim to address financial, academic, and social barriers. More on the seminar theme.

This annual seminar is one of the largest gatherings of journalists covering postsecondary education. Network with others covering this beat and step up your coverage for the upcoming academic year.

During his commencement speech at Morehouse College in Atlanta on May 19, private equity investor and billionaire Robert Smith shocked the audience by announcing he was setting up a grant to pay off the class of 2019’s student loans. The news set off a standing ovation, cheers and plenty of tears among the grateful graduates and their families. But it also raises some important questions for education reporters to consider. Here are four to keep in mind.

Governors across the country are pledging to pump billions of dollars into early childhood education – historic investments that could have a far-reaching impact on the lives of young people.

But their success will depend on how well states implement those initiatives and the scope and quality of the programs put in place, advocates said during the Education Writers Association’s annual conference this month. And it will be up to journalists, the speakers said, to hold those states accountable.

Want to tell a gripping tale? Be prepared to be patient — and really listen — when you do the reporting for your story.

That’s what Chalkbeat Chicago education reporter Adeshina Emmanuel said as he spoke to a room full of education reporters in the EWA session “How I Did The Story, K-12,” describing his method for a story about a 16-year-old Chicago student who could not read.

Are public schools meeting their longstanding obligation to prepare students for the responsibilities of civic life? For the past year, a team of reporters and editors at Education Week has focused on the state of civics education in the U.S., from the instructional materials used by schools to examples where students are “living” civic engagement rather than just studying it. Reporter Stephen Sawchuk discusses the “Citizen Z” project, and how journalists can use it as a blueprint to inform their own work on this critical subject.

What students learn every day in their classes is the core of the K-12 enterprise. And yet, unless it’s part of a really terrible lesson that goes viral, content is rarely the focal point for education news coverage.

As curriculum rises on policymakers’ agendas, it should also be a focus of the nation’s education reporters, agreed panelists at the Education Writers Association’s 72nd annual conference in Baltimore this month.